Clear the track….here comes Jerome!

A funny thing happened on my way home after work last year. It was early November, and I was feeling especially Christmassy. She called me on my cell phone, and as we gabbed, she threw in there that she had purchased an ‘Elf on the Shelf’. I had no idea what she was talking about. How could I? I had never even heard o such a thing. So I just went along with it, nodding my head as if she were in the truck with me, and pretty much forgot about it.

My son Mackie and my wife soon made a game of hiding the damned thing here and there throughout the house. The point was they took turns trying to find it. ‘The Elf is in play!’ I would hear one or the other exclaim. It wasn’t long before I involved myself in this game. We had to be creative. We needed to be secretive. It was mindless fun.

And then our lives changed.

We called him Jerome. And like a lot of people on the internet, started posting pictures of what Jerome was up to. It started off with a few followers, but this soon grew until, if I didn’t post a picture, I would get messages from people asking about where Jerome was. At first, I found this strange….but as the days flew by, I grew to really enjoy the whole thing.

Here’s the thing: in a day and age where rampant consumerism and daily bad news being served up to us in copious amounts by the media, many of us are looking for the simple things in life. The things that bring us back to our childhood, that harken back to a more innocent time. I know Jerome was not back in my childhood, but the thought of Jerome may have been. It is something I surely would have enjoyed as a child, warped sense of humour and all.

Evidently many other people feel the same way. We have been naughty with him. We have been nice. We have shown him as in the innocent eyes possessed by today’s child, and also shown him to be a little more crude. Something for everyone as they say.

So Jerome isn’t for just anybody. That’s okay. Christmas isn’t for everybody either. For some it doesn’t even exist based on faith or belief. And that’s okay too. We all have out thing, and for us, if we can make someone smile, crack up, or even believe in a little bit of silly magic, just or a day….we have accomplished what we set out to do. It is that simple.